'turies more passed ere they had reached the PART I. utmost limits of the Mysore country." Who are these Hindoos? Undoubtedly, a people allied to ourselves, not only in language, but in physical characteristics; a member of that great family of nations which has been called the Indo-Germanic. Their holy language, the Sanskrit, was, undoubtedly, the earliest cultivated of the whole group of kindred tongues, and has proved the master-key by which our philologers have to unlock the secrets of all, whether of Greek or Latin, of Keltic or of Gothic. It is almost startling to trace the close resemblance on many points even of the modern Indian languages with the learned languages of the west, with its ancient or its most modern tongues; to recognise in "Punj-ab," the "five rivers," the IIévre of the Greek, the "aber" of our modern Welsh; in the kindred "Doo-ab" (two rivers, i. e., the mid space between, what the Greeks called by a much longer name, Mesopotamia), the Greek duo, or the Latin duo, and the same Welsh noun; in "Raja," "Raj," the Latin 66 rex," regnum;" in " gurrum," our warm," with such an alteration as that of "ward" into guard;" in the expression "bud-nam," our "bad name," almost without the change of a letter. And physiognomy, as I have said, confirms the witness of language. The straight nose, the beautifully chiselled features and form, all mark the noble Caucasic type. 66 66 You will tell me that colour bars the identity, as that of the aboriginal races with the Tartar. Not so. The true Hindoo of the present day is undoubtedly brown, not black; the tint Races. LECT. III. Races. PART I. lightening by degrees as we approach his ori-* ginal dwelling-place of the north-west, until it LECT. III. becomes scarcely a shade or two darker than that of the southern European. Nay, the lighter tint almost invariably marks the higher caste; the low caste man being often as dark as an aboriginal native. Hence, if we had no further data at hand, we might conclude that the darkness of the Hindoo arises from and is proportional to his intermixture with the aboriginal races; that the dark mass, at the bottom of the Hindoo social system, represents the body of aborigines who must have been incorporated into it. But there is undoubted evidence that the Hindoos were at first, in conformity with their origin, a white race. Not only are all the gods of their early Vedas light or golden-coloured gods, but the writers are found, like a true northern people, reckoning their time by "winters," and speaking of themselves expressly as the "white-complexioned" friends of Indra.1 And it is strikingly related by Greek historians that, of the variety of Indians who came to the Court of Darius Hystaspes, King of Persia, with the fair-complexioned he could converse, but that with the dark-coloured he required an interpreter; evidently indicating that, a thousand years later than the Rig Veda, there was still a marked difference in India between the fair races and the dark, and that the fair races spoke a 1 "May we cherish such a son and such a grandson for a hundred winters; "-"the thunderer then divided the fields with his white-complexioned friends." Rig Veda, Vol. I., pp. 176, 259. Towards the end of the second book, however, where the hymns appear to me to have a more modern cast of thought, a tawny-hued" son is prayed for. Vol. II., p. 219. 66 Races. language cognate to the old Persian, as we know PART I. the Sanskrit to be, whilst the dark spoke a language of another family. Indeed, it may be LECT. III. observed, that the name they gave themselves, the "Aryas," or respectable men, occurs in the "Aria" of ancient geography. I do not think we should suppose that all the Caucasic tribes now included in the Hindoo system entered India together. Mr. Raikes expressly says that the Brahmins appear to have settled in the north-western provinces before the Rajpoots. The Jâts, whom many identify with the Goths, one of the noblest races of India, peaceful and industrious, as well as brave, and thereby distinct from the Rajpoots, equally brave, but turbulent and unthrifty-seem to constitute a distinct immigration of comparatively late date.1 The Catties of Cattywar, a race kindred to the Rajpoots, bold and athletic, and whose women are said to be proverbially graceful and beautiful, are stated to have settled in Guzerat only in the ninth century of our era, though they were probably in India before this period, and are still marked by many national peculiarities. But however formed at first, that assemblage of people which we call the Hindoos is now marked by these leading social characteristics : : An organised polytheism; a social system founded upon caste; definite municipal institutions. I. The first characteristic is in itself very remarkable. For by it the Hindoos stand alone 1 The early pages of the late Major Cunningham's "History of the Sikhs" supply a striking picture of the singular variety of races still distinctly existing in the north-west. PART I. in the modern world, as the representatives of the Races. great nations of antiquity. No doubt there are LECT. III. Pagan tribes in abundance, spread over a large portion of Africa, part of America, part of Asia. But these are all in the condition of the aborigines of India, worshippers of local divinities, one or two, perhaps, at a time. A systematic worship of many gods, having power to mould and inspire literature and art, to shape civil society, to serve as the nucleus for the feeling of nationality-such a worship as the old world presents to us in Egypt and Phoenicia, in Greece and Rome—such a worship is to be found at the present day nowhere else but in India. Not only is it to be found there, but, as far as we can see, it appears to have given birth at least to some of the leading personages in Egyptian and Greek worship. Without pretending to say how far the numerous identifications, by the earlier philologists who took up the study of Sanskrit, of individual divinities and their particular adventures in Hindoo mythology with those of the mythologies of Egypt and Greece, may be in every case correct, I am bound to say, for instance, that the Osiris and Isis, the leading figures of Egyptian mythology, appear to me the Iswara and Isa of the Hindoo; that the worship of the bull Apis must be the Hindoo worship of the cow'; that the Mitra of the Vedas must be the Mithra of the Persians. The Hindoo religion is thus, with Christianity 1 Late as Philostratus may be as an authority, and stuffed with fables as may be his "Life of Apollonius of Tyana," we should not, moreover, forget that sixteen centuries ago he already declared that the Egyptian sages derived all their wisdom from the Indians. and Judaism on the one hand, and Parsee fire- PART I. worship and Chinese philosophy on the other, Races. one of the four ancient things yet alive in the LECT. III. world. But it links itself to the more modern by this, that it is a book-religion. Like Judaism, like Christianity, like Mahommedanism, it has, if we may so term it, a Bible. It has not done its best, like the Greek or Roman, the Assyrian or Phoenician worship, when it has built a temple, carved a statue. It addresses itself to the spiritual principle in man. It speaks, and gathers up the spoken word. Therefore is it higher than those old worships of the east or of the west; therefore it lives, while they have died. On the Vedas, the earliest holy books of the Hindoos, I shall not dwell. The first of them at least, the Rig Veda, belongs to a state of society, to a spiritual and moral condition, so utterly at variance with that of Hindooism at the present day, that it complicates instead of solving its many puzzling riddles, one only excepted. For it does explain the jealousy with which the Brahmin caste has watched over the Vedas, and over the language in which they were written, and the late period at which European scholars have obtained access to them. If it were worth while to shake the foundations of any belief whatsoever, before one is able to uncover for the believer a deeper foundation on which to build a stronger faith, there could be no surer mode of exploding Brahminism, properly so called, than the circulation, in every vernacular language of India spoken by Hindoos, of translations of the Rig Veda, without note or comment. (See Appendix B.) The Brahmins are, no |